Setting up SSH bookmarks within Terminal app is an easy way to quickly connect to remote machines. If you haven’t noticed these in Terminal before it’s probably because they aren’t labeled as bookmarks, and therefore the feature gets frequently overlooked by even the most advanced Mac users. Here’s how to create bookmarks within Terminal, and also two quick ways to access any of those bookmarks from just about anywhere in Mac OS X.

Setting SSH Bookmarks in Terminal

This guide is intended for SSH but it would also work for Telnet:

Launch Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/ folder)

Pull down the “Shell” menu and choose “New Remote Connection”

Choose SSH on the left side, then click the [+] plus icon to add a new server bookmark

Enter the IP of the server – Important note: if you use a custom port and username enter those in the URL field as the following syntax: “-p port user@host.com”

For example, if I use port 24 and the username “dude” for server3.osxdaily.com, the syntax would be: “-p 24 dude@server3.osxdaily.com”

Click “OK” and you’ll find the standard command line syntax for connecting to an SSH server is printed in the connection window

Click “Connect” and away you go, using the custom port and username you specified

You’ll notice we ignored the “User” field in this example because we set a custom port. If the server you are connecting to uses the default port 22 (like the OS X SSH server does) you won’t need to do this.

2 Ways to Quickly Access Terminal Bookmarks

Now that a bookmark has been created, quickly access the bookmarks from just about anywhere using these two methods:

I’ve been looking for a way to bookmark SSH commands and eventually I developed a Mac app for our team, called TaskTips (https://task.tips/). Basically it can save you time by indexing your SSH commands, and autocomplete when you search SSH tasks, executing tasks automatically.

If it is also helpful for someone else, I would be really happy about it.